$14.95

Utopia[0872432416]

ISBN: 0872432416

ISBN-13: 9780872432413

With an introduction by H.G. Wells

A facsimile of the beautiful Limited Editions Club edition by Bruce Rogers, the world renowned book designer. Utopia has been called the first work of science fiction. It was published in 1516. Within five years it had been published in Latin in five European countries. Germans, French and Italians were reading it in their own languages before it came out in More's native English. "A good Catholic undoubtedly he was," says H.G. Wells, "and yet we find him capable of conceiving a non-Christian community excelling all Christendom in wisdom and virtue...in his Utopia he ventures to contemplate, and that not merely wistfully but with some confidence, the possibility of an absolute religious toleration."

Thomas More is, of course, the famous Man for All Seasons, the Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII. He was known throughout Europe for his urbanity, his wit and his immense learning. In Utopia More tells the story of an imaginary state. The framework of the story seems to have been suggested by an incident related in the narrative of the fourth voyage of Amerigo Vespucci, in whose company Raphael Hythloday, the novel's principal character, is represented as having sailed. The influence of the book, both in imaginative literature and in social theory, would be hard to exaggerate. The best evidence for this is that the title, as both a noun and an adjective, has gained a permanent place in the English language.